Part II

Transformations

The following interpretation of The Winter's Tale extends and elaborates my essay on Leontes' jealousy which appeared in American Imago (Vol. 30, Fall 1973, pp. 250-273). Since my interpretation of the play is largely sequential, the earlier essay is not reproduced here, and this introduction summarizes the section already published and describes the general context and structure of what follows.

I argue that a close examination of the text and of relations between characters reveals a complex fabric of motives for Leontes' paranoid response to his fear of separation from idealized others. Although usually dismissed by critics of The Winter's Tale as motiveless, Leontes' madness can be explained as an attempt simultaneously to act out and to repudiate fears of sexual and social violence. In the first acts of the play, he expresses and denies the violations of sexual decorum that are dialectically opposed to the sacred over-evaluation of woman in Renaissance imaginations. Unlike his double (or 'brother'), Polixenes, who avoids his ambivalence by idealization, and unlike the other courtly men, who reflect this over-evaluation, Leontes follows a regressive path toward the object of his ambivalent desires, Hermione, and he attempts to destroy her in order to re-unite himself with a fantasized ideal maternal figure. At the root of his paranoid jealousy is a fear of maternal engulfment, symbolized by the spider (II. i. 39-45).'¹ His actions, then, are responses to this fear. What Freud said of Schreber applies to Leontes: "The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction."²

Leontes attempts to restore ideal femininity by a private, unsharable magical process. Shakespeare, however, confronts him with a spokesman for the play's ideal values, Paulina, and then with the oracle of Apollo. When his attempt at recovery fails with the death of his son, he reverses himself and vows to mourn Hermione and Mamillius, mother and son, and thus to "recreate" himself.

In the following pages, I begin by examining the role of Paulina and the ironic reversals of the trial scene, in which Leontes' revenge is transformed into a promise of reparation. I then turn to the Bohemian scenes, in which Shakespeare enacts socially viable alternatives to Leontes' private magic, and, finally, I return with the play to Sicily, where Leontes, recovered from his jealousy, meets the embodiments of his wishes. My purpose is to show how Shakespeare transforms the fears and realities of loss into the theatrical revelation of fulfillment, and how we as audience are brought into collusion with his theatrical design.

I have shown that Leontes' jealousy stems from ambivalent desires rooted in the earliest of human relationships. This is not to say that he is 'really' an infant disguised as a king, but that oral ambivalence provides a coordinated paradigm for his extreme behavior. He desires and fears maternal presence, and he seeks the absolute correspondence of fantasy and reality characteristic of the time when the boundary between self and not-self was fluid and dependent on the 'feedback' of the external world. As his desired omnipotence fails, he is made to confront the play's most aggressive human embodiment of his ambivalent wish, Paulina.

Paulina, like her husband, is entirely Shakespeare's creation, with no counterpart in Greene's Pandosto. ³ Her psychological function is indicated by the ways in which her role fluctuates, in intensity and verbal orientation, in accordance with Leontes' psychic condition. When he is adamant, she is; when he denies, she asserts; when he complies, she softens. She possesses him in the way a projected super-ego would, by attacking, watching, reminding, insisting on the imperatives of the ideals she embodies. Her aim is to focus the articulation of exemplary values before the threat of their imminent rupture.

      Paulina functions as a mediator, and, like all ultimately successful comic mediators, she combines the characteristics of what she defends and what she manifestly opposes. When she enters the world of the play (at II. ii), Leontes has already confined Hermione in prison in his desperation to contain the feminine representative of contamination. Paulina arrives at the prison to gain access to the Queen, and immediately becomes the self-appointed instrument of her confined mistress. She functions positively to negate the negative identities Leontes has projected on to mother and child. Her ethical narcissism makes her the spokesman for the play's most significant manifest values.

      As her name implies, Paulina embodies religious adherence to the purity of the material ideal, the" law and process of great nature" (II. ii. 60). From her first appearance, she assumes the role of the maternal super-ego and throughout the play, until the final lines spoken by Leontes, she acts to bind him to that ideal in all its mythic fullness.

This child was prisoner to the womb, and is

By law and process of great nature, thence Free'd and

enfranchis'd; not a party to

The anger of the king, nor guilty of

(If any be) the trespass of the queen. (II. ii. 59-63)

In the ideal of "great nature," Paulina conflates the process of birth with the legal terminology that allies her thinking with Leontes'. Equating the womb with a prison and birth with freed on merges the biological process of creation with the cultural boundaries that define (and confine) courtly life. Paulina is manifestly absolving the infant from guilt, but her metaphor expresses the very fantasy Leontes responds to, the fantasy that maternal care is a confinement, a punishment. "Great nature" sanctions a freedom the womb denies; by elevating biological reality to the realm of cultural myth, Paulina becomes the guarantor of values that transform sexual ambivalence into supra-personal law. The child is then "innocent" by virtue of its dissociation from personal violation or guilt.

      Paulina's hyper-sensitivity to violations of "great nature" seems, however, directly contradicted by her modes of self presentation. Before the trial scene (III. ii.), the negations of Leontes' violence come most powerfully in the form of her verbal violence in the name of the ideal.⁴ In the play's first half, Leontes and Paulina are made to collude in dramatizing polar tendencies of the myth of feminine purity, each seeming a devil (or" heretic" [II. iii. 114]) to the moral absolutism of the other. They share the quality of fixity that implicitly denies human actuality, with its inevitable ambivalent emotions, in favor of aggressive intrusion into the private space of others. As A. D. Nuttall puts it, "entry-forcing" is Paulina's forte.⁵

"Entry-forcing," in psychoanalytic terms, implies phallic motives, and there is no shortage of phallic-agressive as well as oral imagery associated with Paulina. She embodies intensely the linguistic potency first associated with Hermione: "If I prove honey-mouth'd, let my tongue blister, /And never to my red-look'd anger be/The trumpet any more" (II. ii. 33-35). A few lines later, she expresses her intentions in language that equates phallic and maternal images: 'I'll use that tongue I have: if wit flow from't/As boldness from my bosom" (II. ii. 52-53). This unconscious equation of feminine and phallic potency defines the language spoken by and associated with her in the court caught up in the web of Leontes' jealousy. Leontes calls her" A callat/Of boundless tongue" (II. iii. 109), tells Antingonus that he "wilt not stay her tongue" (II. iii. 109), and later, when the oracle can no longer be rejected, submits to her verbal punishment: "I have deserv'd/All tongues to talk their bitt'rest" (III. ii. 215-216). Paulina is imagined to contain precisely that aspect of feminine power Leontes sought to eject magically in the image of the spider (II. i. 39-45), the power to render him passive and to overwhelm him psychically.

      Paulina's function as the external counterpart of Leontes' terrors is confirmed by his indirect acknowledgement of her inexcludability: "I charg'd thee that she should not come about me/ I knew she would" (II. iii. 43-44).⁶ Her physical and verbal intrusiveness is bound to be experienced by him as an assault on his masculinity, his autonomy and his kingly omnipotence. When she penetrates his chamber (II. iii.), "with words as medicinal as true" (37), against his command that" None should come at him" (32), we witness the confrontation of a 'child-bearing' woman (not the play's only visual pun) and a man whose psychic torment centers on just that image. In the labile world of fantasy, the woman with the child is, for Leontes, a masculine figure, "A mankind witch!" (68) and Paulina reinforces this fantasy: "I say good queen, / And would by combat make her good, so were I/A man, the worst about you" (59-61).⁷ Negations also affirm affirm and Leontes is in no condition to make distinctions between fantasy and reality. Being outside the confrontation (if we are, psychologically, outside it), we may find Paulina's uncontrolled tongue comic, but Leontes finds the image of his horror confirmed in the face of combat. Her "medicine" is a form of persecution. Paulina's therapy by verbal and visual assault results, not in reconversion and nurturance, but only in the intensification of the anxieties she comes to quell. When she proclaims the great difference between Leontes' madness and the truth of his issue ("...once remove/The root of his opinion, which is rotten/As ever oak or stone was sound" [II. iii. 80-90]), her proof is the identity of father and child:

But, as I have shown, for Leontes, identity masks ambivalence, and ambivalence denied is transformed, Lear-like, into rage. Paulina's insistence on the identity of father and child incites him first to command that the child be "consum'd with fire" (II. iii. 133)⁸ and then, in a mitigating alternative, to order it banished" strangely to some place/Where chance may nurse or end it" (II. iii. 181-182). The femininity of the child adds irony to Paulina's failure. Shakespeare has confronted Leontes in his paranoid rage with a super-ego that threatens to infantilize him by exposing the infantile symbol of his ambivalent wishes. Leontes duplicates his unconscious fear in commanding that the child be exposed to oral deprivation. To accept Paulina's truth would be to equate himself with his feminine issue, to contradict his masculine ego. But, like Posthumus, Leontes must be "re-created" before he can accept so radical a re-definition of himself. Paulina, as we shall see when we come to the last act, will succeed where first she fails.

In the climactic scene of the play's first half (III. ii.), Leontes seeks to sanction his regressive confusion in the form of a public trial. Public ritual has become the vehicle of intrapsychic, personal motives. In this context of communal differentiation between innocence and guilt, Leontes "attempts to masquerade as his victim's superego."⁹ In acting out his fantasy, Leontes attempts to displace Apollo’s affirmation of socially recognized identities. The trial scene dramatizes Leontes' failed paternity by confronting him with the strength of the family myth that will actually sanction personal and collective continuity in the play. Leontes' jealousy becomes, then, part of a larger rhythm, a regression that serves the transcendent superego he attempts to violate. The trial scene, in short, reflects the larger strategy by which Shakespeare designs this play, the strategy of making a regressive attack on hierarchic pieties into a reconfirmation of hierarchic stability.

In announcing his procedural openness, Leontes establishes the terms of his own trial. As the scene proceeds, we move from Hermione's vigorous defense against his accusations to an indictment of Leontes himself and, dramatically speaking, from ritual fom1ality to frenetic action, as Leontes' defensive projections fail to withstand their consequences. By re-enacting his disease as ritual, Shakespeare differentiates Leontes' profane play from Apollo's sacred one.

      Hermione's defense exemplifies the cognitive clarity Leontes lacks; her language eloquently enacts her capacity to transform a personal defense into generalized virtues. Hers is a consciousness under strong ego control. Feminine virtu finds its voice in her character.

She clearly perceives the difference between herself and the perception of herself by her accuser, the difference between the trans formative powers of a private fantasy and the shared imagination of parental protection, .. powers divine." Hermione tests reality from the position of a collective myth of parental perfection. If the trust of "powers divine" leads her to allegorize her immediate situation, such allegorization is not a regressive substitute for an immediate reality, but a way of coping with the threat that reality poses, a positive defense against sexualized distortions. Her faith in transcendent parental authority distinguishes the wished-for embodiments of childhood desire from" our human actions," whereas Leontes confuses these realms.

      Hermione claims her integrity and honor as derivatives of her obedience to ideal internalized paternal imagos. Three times we are reminded that she is the daughter of a king. (In Shakespeare, the chaste woman is finally imagined as the daughter of a benevolent father.)¹⁰ As the oracle of Apollo is summoned, she articulates the difference between lost paternity and Leontes' dislocated revenge:

The Emperor of Russia was my father:

O that he were alive, and here beholding

His daughter’s trial! That he did but see

The flatness of my misery, yet with eyes

Of pity, not revenge! (III.ii.119-123)

Justice, when it lacks the communal sanction of a transcendent myth, becomes personal revenge.¹¹ Apollo's "vengeance" (IIII.ii.201) will reconstitute the identities distorted by Leontes' disease, but not before Hermione speaks his indictment:

The failure of paternity is here powerfully identified with the violation of oral expectations, the negation of "comfort," "favor," "first-fruits," "innocent milk." Leontes has created what he feared most deeply, has become a catastrophic "mother" to the mother of his children, and like Macbeth has transformed the ceremonies of innocence into poisoned nurturance. Earlier his infanticidal fantasy directly echoed Lady Macbeth ("The bastard brains with these my proper hands/ Shall I dash out." [II. iii. 139-140]), and now the consequence of his failed nurturance is the repudiation of his paternal authority:

                                                    Your honors all,

I do refer me to the Oracle:

Apollo be my judge!                     (III.ii.114-116)

For Shakespeare paternal authority involves at its very center the benevolent control of maternal care, the" delicate," "sweet," "fertile," "ceremonious, solemn and unearthly" ministration of the potentially violent powers associated with an unconscious maternal imago, and here associated with Apollo (in III.i.1-7). Leontes is controlled by that imago internally, and the result is the direct, though symbolic, intervention of the violated ideal. The oracle delivers the reversal of Leontes' reversal of ideal identities:¹²

Each is equated with a defining attribute that unites essence and appearance, the person and the person's socially recognized reality. What more potent transformation of bodily, sexual, boundary-confusing personal experience is possible? Apollo is literally un-embodied, present only in words.

       Leontes flatly denies Apollo's pronouncement: "There is no truth at all i' th' Oracle" (III. ii. 140), calling upon himself the full violence of Apollonian justice:

          Leon.     How! gone?

These lines link Apollonian anger with the son's death and the son's death with the internalization of the mother's violation. Yet they also contain deeper symbolic resonance. Insofar as he identified Mamillius with his phallic potency, Leontes is symbolically castrated, and insofar as his son represents his childhood self, his "injustice" meets with symbolic (and, shortly afterward, real) maternal deprivation. The queen's "speed" is, moreover, ambiguous. The Arden edition note equates it with Hermione's "fate" or "fortune," but "speed" is associated in the play with the power of action itself, with general potency.¹³ In this sense, "mere conceit and fear/Of the queen's speed" becomes a symbolic crystallization of Leontes' psychic condition as well as his son's. Apollo's anger projects the paternal response to the sons' (Leontes' and Mamillius') "conceit and fear" of maternal power. Immediately, Hermione faints, and we are led to believe her dead. Then, only then, does Leontes recover the consciousness of differences:

The enactment of his jealousy is reduced to "great profaneness" against the paternal words, as he re-assimilates himself to the sacred view of pure identities and vows to reconstitute lost relationships. What follows is a recitation of his crimes and a vivid statement of the difference between anal violation and Polixenes' pietistic purity:

                                                              …how he glistens

Through my rust! and how his piety

Does my deeds make the blacker. (III. ii. 170-172)

In the rest of the scene Leontes is reduced almost to speechlessness (infantilized) as Paulina delivers the most powerful feminine attack in the play. He accepts and encourages her verbal punishment, a complete reversal of his sadistic intentions into their passive, masochistic counterpart. Paulina levels at him a recapitulation of his crimes (crimes she could not have known literally), culminating in a terrifying judgment:

                                            A thousand knees

Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,

Upon a barren mountain, and still winter

In storm perpetual, could not move the gods

To look that way thou wert. (III. ii. 210-214)

These words convey absolute helplessness, in the context of absolute oral deprivation, to recover parental presence; they evoke the impotence of infancy in a world of lost omnipotent possibility. For Leontes that psychic reality is the equivalent of his psychic murder of Hermione. Shakespeare, in making this psychic reality a literal dramatic fact for us, makes the omnipotence of thoughts and the dramatic world converge. In the world of the play and in the experience of it, murderous fantasy and reality are united in the announcement of Hermione's death. We are made, in the moment before Leontes vows to "recreate" himself through the ritual of mourning, to experience the world as he did.

      Leontes leaves the world of the play to return in the final act, a figure of repentance. Then an immediate transposition occurs, a shift in scene that both separates us from his inner process of reparation and resymbolizes the central components of that process in a displaced, distanced context. In the economy of the play this scene forms a pivot, a psychic landscape that shifts central tensions from the inner world of Leontes to the outer Bohemian boundary between land and sea.

(What better location for restructuring boundary confusion than a coast, the place that demarcates fluidity and solidity, change and fixity, and also brings them into interplay?) For if Leontes embodies the unsuccessful struggle to reconcile the desire for sacred, nurturant maternity with the violence associated with its loss, we encounter the expressions of these split possibilities on the Bohemian coast. Sacred maternity returns in Antigonus' vision of Hermione and finds duplicate expression in the attributes of her child, while catastrophic loss is projected as the action of the sea and the pursuit by the bear. Here, at the structural center of the play, "great difference" intensifies to cosmic proportions.

      Antigonus stands alone on the stage, surrounded by impending violence. As the storm gathers to engulf him and his ship, he delivers the play's longest single speech, a further indication of the immense value words hold in Shakespeare's struggle against projected violence. Within his speech Hermione appears in a dream (a double defense), a ceremonial figure whose rage over loss is brought under control in alternating physical and verbal articulation:

                                    To me comes a creature,

Sometimes her head on one side, some another;

I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,

So fill'd, and so becoming: in pure white robes,

Like very sanctity, she did approach

My cabin where I lay: thrice bow'd before me,

And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes

Became two spouts; the fury spent, anon

Did this break from her. . . (III. iii. 19-27)

In what Antigonus and the audience suppose is death, Hermione claims her full power, the power of the "immortal object,"¹⁴ the sanctified mother who confers identity on her child. This internalized image of the mother combines frightening daemonic power with maternal care; her purity and ceremonial actions suggest the figure of the Virgin Mother. When she speaks, her words absolve Antigonus of personal responsibility even as they enforce the verdict of an archaic logic of retribution:

                                                    'Good Antigonus,

Since fate, against they better disposition,

Hath made thy person for the thrower-out

Of my poor babe, according to thine oath,

Places remote enough are in Bohemia,

There weep, and leave it crying: and, for the babe Is counted lost for ever, Perdita,

I prithee, call't. For this ungentle business,

Put on thee by my lord, thou ne'er shalt see

Thy wife Paulina more: (III. iii. 27-36)

The speech rationalizes its speaker's grief in a highly defended mode, for it is a speech within a speech, doubly distanced from the immediacy of natural violence. Its logic argues for the correspondence of "fate" and consequential action, a magical structuring of action determined by transcendent (that is to say, displaced) forces. Antigonus has become an actor in a play no person writes. Yet the speech, even as it clearly differentiates Antigonus from his role in the play of fate, also abandons the distinction between personal" disposition" and punishment. He is to be punished as an instrument, not as a person, and his sentence-death, seen as separation from a woman-is not mitigated by his manifest intentions. Leontes himself has become the agent of transcendent forces in this restructuring of relationships; only the child Perdita embodies the correspondence of essence and appearance, conferred identity and recognized character.

      The psychology of the whole play, however, is governed by such a deeply rooted terror of and wish for maternal power that even mental transgressions inflict total punishments. Antigonus may be merely the vehicle of his master's wishes, but he does share with Leontes a belief in Hermione's guilt: "…poor wretch,/That for they mother's fault art thus expos'd/ To loss and what may follow" (III. iii. 49-51). In believing that Leontes' delusion is reality, that the child is Polixenes', that he is performing the will of Apollo in separating mother and child, Antigonus recapitulates the play's central crimes. All this serves to identity him, beneath his apparent logicality, with Leontes in his pathological condition. Shakespeare's defensive displacements can be ruthlessly ironic.

      The response to his mental crimes comes in the form of Shakespeare's most startling dramatic action: "Exit, pursued by a bear." Taken in by the idea of maternal transgressions, Antigonus is quite literally taken in by a bear. Oral rage materializes in dreamlike response to the expression of maternal imperfection. In the psychology of The Winter's Tale, the only stable guarantee of external nurturance is the absolute, pre-rational, internalized acceptance of feminine inviolability. Any expression of ambivalence, however logically cast on a manifest level, leads to broken relationships, physical violence, or death.

      "Exit, pursued by a bear." Oral violence is not only externalized but depersonalized and dehumanized, so that its expression becomes a function of the" natural" world, outside the civilization of the court, and outside human control. Separated from the matrix of nurturant society, Antigonus, like Lear, encounters not indifference, but the transformation of nurturance into projections of parental anger

("the skies look grimly" [III. iii. 3], "thou'rt like to have / A lullaby too rough" [III. iii. 54-55]). The bear may stand for Leontes in his rage, but it also stands for the surrender of that rage to the natural world, a Shakespearean strategy of deadly sport. Shakespeare, as Norman Holland points out, seems to be engaged in a visual pun on "bear."¹⁵ What the men of the play cannot" bear" (feminine bearing, childbirth) pursues them; what produces a "barne" also threatens engulfment. The bear" is " Leontes in the partial sense that it embodies the mother he embodies psychically and who, in turn, embodies his representative. It is no accident that Antigonus was the one to identify wolves and bears with nurses (II. iii. 186-188).

      The domestic aspect of this Shakespearean sport emerges in the Clown's taste for metaphor:

To make the violence of engulfment bearable, Shakespeare has the Shepherd and his son displace the violence of the storm (itself an expression of displaced violence) to language; he shifts emphasis from the sight of engulfment to an account of it, and from the account to the teller:

Highly defended as it is, the Clown's fantasy plays with the deepest anxieties of the play. If we take our clue from the erotic meaning of "service"¹⁶ we can recognize a fantasy of sexual contact suffused with boundary anxieties, as the feminine ship, phallic and penetrating, is itself swallowed like a phallic cork in a hogs-head. Highly charged sight followed by disappearance, alternating activity and passivity, the confusion of phallic and oral language, the Clown's intermixture of sea-and-land-service, bodily and natural violence, his own fantasy and the external event-all this creates a transposed re-enactment of Leontes' confusion, Hermione's" fury" and Paulina's curse. We may also imagine Shakespeare sinking the maternal " vessel" he fears. In any case, on land and sea the fantasized concomitants of Leontes' ambivalent wish for fusion are exorcized. Yet the shame associated with Leontes' fantasy of sexual contact enacted by surrogates for himself dissolves in this re-enactment of his anxieties. The Clown's speech, in its self-conscious diction, its stylized mixture of subjectivity and objective reporting, and in its balance (at the end) of action and response, transforms archaic terrors into structured art. It thus forms a miniature of the transformative strategy of the whole play.

Other important transformations occur in the scene's second half. Perdita, magically exempt from the catastrophic effects of the storm and the bear, comes to embody the essence of the wish for dual unity initially symbolized by the" twinn'd lambs" of Polixenes' childhood fantasy. The Shepherd, who immediately replaces Antigonus in the paternal role (only these two are called" old man" [III. iii. 106-107, 119]), has come in search of " two of my best sheep" (65-66); the sheep have been frightened by youths, with whom the Shepherd associates sexual transgressions ("getting wenches with child" [61-62]), and adolescent aggression; their behavior exposes the sheep to the" wolf" (66) of the extra-civilized world. When he finds the child, she (and the riches that come with her, for the Shepherd is avid for wealth) is found instead of his sheep. "Let my sheep go" (124), he says to his son. This symbolic act of exchange signifies, I think, the abandonment of the substitute for the original unity with the mother (the masculine bond of the boyhood myth) in a return to the symbol of the original unity itself, the maternal child. In the marvelous economy of this exchange, Shakespeare enacts a benign version of the regressive rhythm Leontes followed. Now the curse of death (sexualized violence) cannot impinge on the desire for life.¹⁷

"Now bless thyself: thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born" (112-113). Here, in the pivotal line of this pivotal scene, union and separation of death and life, disintegration and revitalization, come together in the shape of language. To keep "things dying" (associated with winter, sexual confusion and boundary loss) separate from" things re-born" (associated with spring, and patterned, lawful creativity) and to bring them together through the structured mediation of art comprises the Shakespearean strategy for mastering his love-hate relationship with an archaic mother child matrix and its cultural embodiments. If the Clown's description of the storm and the bear exemplifies the transformation of the dangers adhering to this matrix, the Shepherd's line exemplifies the broader strategy of balancing the opposites symbolically to allow for symbolic interplay. As we shall see, this more inclusive strategy is central to the repopulation of the play's world in the long sequence of the pastoral.

      To close gaps, Shakespeare first widens them. On the coast of Bohemia he widened the spatial distance between the locus of conflict and its reenactment, and now, in the figure of Time, he widens the gap between the past and the future, infancy and adolescent blossoming, and he bridges it simultaneously. As A. D. Nuttall says, "Shakespeare's Time chorus is an unashamedly allegorical figure who has stepped out of an altogether older type of drama, perhaps with some assistance from the fashionable world of the Masque."¹⁸ The fact of Time's Time's appearance announces Shakespeare's theatricality, makes his play self-reflexive, restores authorial awareness. In other words, Time reconstitutes the awareness Leontes lost of the difference between action and the consciousness of it as " acting" in the theatrical sense. Time, before he speaks, says, "This is a play."¹⁹ In a play so preoccupied with the effects of time, close attention to the nature of Time offers clues to the dynamics of Shakespeare's theatricality:

      The figure of Time presents itself not merely as the active agent of pleasure but also as the agent of judgment. Time is inclusive (" joy and terror," "good and bad," "makes and unfolds"), in sharp contrast to the exclusive priorities of the play's earlier action. Time's power is authorial in all the senses Shakespeare's authorial presence makes itself felt in the play. One aspect of this presence is its paternal omnipotence, the" power/To o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour/To plant and O'erwhelm custom" (7-9). Another is the power of fantasy to "make stale/The glistering of this present, as my tale/Now seems to it" (13-15), the power to declare "great difference." This authorial presence can abolish the claims of time itself, can make the reality of separation into the timeless space of a dream, "and give my scene such growing/ As you had slept between" (16-17). Time embodies in words the paradox that will be realized in the final scene, the capacity of time, imagined as timeless, to deny time. In the world of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare makes acceptance of this paternal image the condition for our reception of his reversal of imagined loss.

      But if the figure of Time is invested with the powers of a self-sufficient paternal image, this figure also reverses the roles of parent and child by inviting us to indulge his transgressions of reality:

Impute it not a crime

To me, or my swift passage, that I slide

O'er sixteen years. . . (4-6)

Here we are the parental figures. In making us the judges of Time, Shakespeare, in effect, invites our complicity in his authorial fantasy. This is not mere rhetoric, but a pre figural strategy that will come to full fruition in the final scene. Seductive tact and theatrical decorum invest the mystique Paulina will direct then, and now we are invited to dignify the techniques she will use. Shakespeare plays Time to use our trust to sanction his.

With this authorial perspective we enter the world of Bohemia.

      Act IV, scene ii, the structural counterpart of the Sicilian departure scene (I. ii), re-presents the play's central preoccupation with separation and revises its earlier consequence. This time no woman is called upon to mediate the king's desire for the continuous presence of his friend. The scene dramatizes the avoidance of separation in the context of masculine idealizations. Camillo, whom Polixenes promised to respect "as a father" (I. ii. 461) in exchange for lifesaving passage from Sicily, now occupies the position of Polixenes in the earlier scene; he seeks reunion with his lost country and master. Polixenes, now in the position of Leontes, openly confesses the absolute dependency he feels. Here the dependency relationship so precariously desired by Leontes finds rich expression:

Pol.    As thou lov'st me, Camillo, wipe not out the rest of thy services by leaving me now:

           the need I have of thee, thine own goodness hath made; better not to have had thee than thus to want thee. (10-13)

Like Leontes, Polixenes claims total love, and obliquely suggests that a break in continuity is a form of aggressive denial of what was given in the past. Implicit in his avowal of need is the threat that separation will evoke the loss of love. In the economics of such love, the actual presence of the needed other is the only guarantee against emotional reversal, and Polixenes promises fuller payment of thanks in exchange for the guarantee he requires: "… to be more thankful to thee shall be my study; and my profit therein, the heaping friendships" (18-20).

      Polixenes dreads separation from the sources of his continuous well-being. In the course of this short scene he equates separation with death, recalls the loss of Leontes' queen and children and devises a strategy for preventing the loss of his son.²¹ As we might expect, his fear for his son focuses on feminine power, in language that again recalls Leontes: "...I fear, the angle that plucks our son thither" (46-47). Separation is prevented when the two men unite in the artifice of disguise; they agree to become the concealed embodiments of paternal vigilance. In Bohemia change and loss are mitigated by strategies for linking dependency to artifice, as we shall see more fully in the pastoral. Polixenes succeeds where Leontes failed because he can defer Camillo's wish for reunion in the interest of his own wish for the recovery of his absent son, and he can do this without the aid of a woman. Shakespeare makes the recovery of masculine trust the pre-requisite for the validating of trust in women. Where such masculine trust is displayed, the ground is prepared for the reversal of paranoiac fears.

Before we enter the pastoral festival, Shakespeare introduces his most playful embodiment of subversive action, Autolycus. His presence in the play indicates how full is Shakespeare's control of the sacrilegious terrors of Leontes' jealousy, for Autolycus is permitted to play with and play on the sexuality and boundary confusions that threaten courtly life. Shakespeare's rhythmic patterning of threat and defense is nowhere clearer than in the fact of his presence. From the moment of his opening song, he celebrates the triumph of spring over winter, nurturance and sexuality over the violent splitting of the two:

      Autolycus is "out of service" (IV. iii. 14), and his response to separation completely lacks the anxiety of the courtly characters. Instead of clinging to the sources of physical and emotional supplies, Autolycus plays with his fears, and he makes changes his constancy, directionlessness his direction, role playing his role:

Through him Shakespeare restores a childlike sophistication to the play, making the open expression of super-ego anxieties and the fear of violence into resilient forms of mastery.

      Autolycus means" very wolf." He presents himself as a " snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" (IV. iii. 26), true to his paternal heritage, for he was" littered under Mercury" (25). Mercury, we remember, stole the oxen of Apollo in his infancy, charmed Apollo with songs, and was worshipped by shepherds. For Autolycus orality-aggressive and musical-is a form of family loyalty, not family violation. When he encounters the Clown on the way to buy food for the festival, we see a fine example of his strategic use of his deprived condition. He presents himself as the victim of robbery, aggression and body mutilation (as Leontes did), indeed, as a victim of himself (91-97), in order to get what the Clown has, money. To gratify himself, he announces a projection of himself as the tormentor of himself, a neat parallel of Leontes' abortive script. After his pocket is picked, the Clown becomes for Autolycus the embodiment of oral gratification, four times called" sweet sir" (78, 107, Ill, 114). Autolycus makes narcissistic needs into displays of dependency in order to control his victim.

      Autolycus functions as a parodic foil to the masculine anxieties of the court. A creature of surfaces, and of words, he is a veritable grab-bag of perverse fantasies. He exhibits himself and his wares with a theatricality that is the counterpart of Leontes' paranoid projections. Leontes assimilates surface behavior to private fantasy; Autolycus provides the surfaces (sheets in the double sense, cloth and paper) upon which others project their desires:

Leontes is taken in by his own fantasy; Autolycus uses fantasies to take in others. As he tells us after the festivities, his profit derives from the idolatry of his victims:

The artifice of signs of love which the opening scene announced as the symbolic expression of union comprises Autolycus' means for preying on the narcissism of others. He renders his prey helpless with theatrical displays, visual and verbal fantasies, an ironic reduction of Shakespeare's own theatrical powers. He acts out playfully one side of Shakespeare's ambivalent relation to the religious stance the play finally affirms. Idolatry, he tells us, is a form of sexual vulnerability: ".. .you might have pinched a placket, it was senseless; 'twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse. .." (IV. iv. 610612). And its actual effect is the admiration of "Nothing" (615), actual deprivation, and the illusion of feminine wholeness:

What maids lack from head to heel. (IV. iv. 228-229)

For those who. cannot believe the gaps in their mistresses, Autolycus is the man to see.

      In the manipulative strategies of Autolycus, Shakespeare also displaces and contains the perverse fantasies Leontes projected on to intimate family relationships. Now these fantasies become the stuff of art, not the realities of courtly life:

Aut. Here's one, to a very doleful tune, how a usurer's wife was brought to bed

        of twenty money-bags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders' head

        and toads carbonadoed. (IV. iv. 263-266)

The primary process illusions of Leontes' jealousy have been transformed in a secondary process context-the art form of the ballad-and once this" art space" is secured Shakespeare makes the fantasy of perverse birth and feminine engulfment an ironic indulgence at the expense of his pastoral characters:

We can laugh at their gullibility because Shakespeare has restored the difference between play and reality. Bateson succinctly defines this difference: "In primary process, map and territory are equated; in secondary process, they can be discriminated. In play, they are both equated and discriminated."²² Such a capacity to play depends on tolerating the separateness of self and other at the very moment that separateness is denied in fantasy. In the Sicilian court the equation of map and territory (Leontes' madness) confronts its polar opposite, the absolute discrimination of private fantasy from public myth (Paulina's and Apollo's stances). In the pastoral play of Bohemia the" great difference" lies in the process of playing itself, the interplay of equation and discrimination of pure identities and perverse or dangerous transformations. As we shall see, in a way very different from Autolycus', this interplay is central to the central symbolic person of the play, Perdita.²³

      The pastoral festival of The Winter's Talc offers us a resilient defense against the sexual and familial dislocations dramatized earlier. It comprises a full-scale play-within-the play, and it can be divided easily into five acts.²⁴ The pastoral offers us a defense against boundary anxieties in the fullest psychoanalytic meaning of the term defense, by transforming those anxieties into coordinated expressions that contain those anxieties in the rhythm of the form itself.

      Notice, for example, the two dances that temporarily suspend the action of the plot. The first is a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses and it comes after Perdita has given her flowers to the others, as if to celebrate the completion of her role in the festival. The second, a dance of twelve satyrs, complements the first, in the sense that it acts out a rough and phallic rhythm, as if to introduce the rupture of the festival mood that follows. Shakespeare does split this world, but my point is that he does it in ways that integrate the surface rhythm of the play and its defining motives. A symbolic union of opposites is expressed in the formal interplay of the pastoral world itself.²⁵

      Another way to say this is to evoke the term coined by Phyllis Greenacre in her studies of creative capacities, "collective alternates." She defines this as a capacity to realize "a communion with outer forms which reflect inner feelings,"²⁶ a synthesis of objects and rhythms external to the self with inner objects, relationships and rhythms. In the pastoral world of The Winter's Tale, I believe, Shakespeare achieves such a synthesis. To take one further example, consider part of Florizel's idealization of Perdita:

To call this his wish for an ideal mother is accurate (more on that later), but what I am concerned to point out now is the way in which the lines create the rhythm they are about. When we listen to that rhythm do we not hear the motion of the wave? Do we not hear, also, the echo of Leontes' erupting madness, now transformed into its opposite?

                    . . .my heart dances,

But not for joy-not joy. (I. ii. 110-111)

The pastoral rhythm re-forms the earlier rhythm in the context of an image of continuity, creating a micro-dramatic reflection of the continuity of relationships the play itself enacts.

These your unusual weeds, to each part of you

Do give a life: no shepherdess, but Flora

Peering in April's front. (IV. iv. 1-3)

In barely three lines he has expressed the essence of his idealizing imagination; he equates Perdita's visual surface with her actual vitality, negates her social status in favor of a mythical identity, and displaces his visual interest on to its object. If she is Flora, he, Florizel, exists in an idealized symbiosis with her.²⁷ Like a child's narcissistic relation to an idealized mother imago, his relation to Perdita reflects his own need for an externally continuous source of identity. Such a reflection precedes the formation of a separate self.

                                        For I cannot be

Mine own, nor anything to any, if

I be not thine. To this I am most constant,

Though destiny say no.      (IV. iv. 43-46)

Constancy consists in absolute fixation on this timeless imago.

       The image of the woman as an external source of continuity has its developmental roots in what Rene A. Spitz has called the primal dialogue of mother and child.²⁸ In the early months of life, we seek a correspondence of inner and outer presence, a "fit" between self and other that permits separation and fusion of identities to alternate until separation can be accepted. The acceptance of separation, however, involves a paradox, for it only occurs if the mother is internalized as a constant imago for the child. Separation involves a psychic denial of separation. If the mother is feared as engulfing or catastrophic, this process of separation can result in the need for an external, idealized maternal presence which serves as a defense against the possibility of inner regression. In Leontes, we see this regressive process and in Florizel the restoration of the relationship that obviates the regression by realizing the wish for external continuity.

      Consider Florizel's beautiful evocation of Perdita's vitality once again:

                                    When you do speak, sweet,

I'd have you do it ever: when you sing,

I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,

Pray so, and, for the ord'ring your affairs,

To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you

A wave O' th' sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that, move still, still so,

And own no other function. Each your doing,

So singular in each particular,

Crowns what you are doing, in the present deeds,

That all your acts are queens. (IV. iv. 136-146)

Perdita, that which was lost in Leontes' madness, is re-created in this speech. Florizel wishes for a woman whose change is continuity, not loss, whose functions are her essence, whose expression is song and dance. He would re-create in the media of her art an image that transcends the possibility of the separation dramatized earlier, the violent splitting of appearance and reality, illusion and fact. He would have her be that fusion. This fantasy seems, in the moment we absorb it, utterly to reverse the terror of maternal engulfment. Yet he presents the fantasy explicitly as a wish. The reversal of Leontes' condition works within the dynamics of that condition, but Florizel repeats the wish for fusion from the perspective of successful defense against its catastrophic variation.

To see the defensive aspect of Florizel's idealizations, consider what he needs to negate. Perdita is to be "Nothing but" her idealized self, .. no shepherdess, but Flora. ".. Apprehend/ Nothing but jollity" (Iv. iv. 24-25) , he tells her. In response to her recognition of the demands of social hierarchy, he speaks in extremely revealing images:

                                                                Be merry, gentle

Strangle such thoughts as these with anything

That you behold the while. (IV. iv. 46-48, italics added)

To strangle the thought of separation with anything beheld (a word that suggests visual attraction and the idea of holding and being held) bespeaks the anxiety he wards off by fixating on her ideal self. Turning toward external images of positive inner wishes defends against inarticulate inner dangers. In being the ideal screen for the projection of those inner wishes, Perdita is for Florizel what Florizel was for his father:

Like Florizel, Polixenes creates in his son an image of external transformations to diminish the reality of time and to defend against unspecified inner disease. Loss is denied by the multiplication of a potentially infinite number of roles for the significant other play. Florizel, like his father and Leontes, is a playwright in fantasy.

At least two further aspects of this complex masculine strategy deserve our attention. The first concerns the way which the idealization of the other involves a kind of feedback to the self, a self-idealization. Florizel counters the threat of the father by identifying himself with the transformations of the gods:

                            The gods themselves,

Humbling their deities to love, have taken

The shapes of beasts upon them:

Jupiter Became a bull, and bellow'd; the green Neptune

A ram, and bleated; and the fire-rob'd god, Golden

Apollo, a poor humble swain,

As I seem now.                             (IV. iv. 25-31)

We can read these lines in an Oedipal context and see Florizel identifying with the aggressor as a defense against the incestuous aspect of his maternal fixation. Indeed, he tells us that he is purer and more controlled than those paternal models of sexuality (II. 32-35). But his self-aggrandizement also mirrors his idealization of Perdita, allows him to fantasize a utopia of two, and confuses humility with the dismissal of paternal reality. In psychoanalytic terms, a pre-Oedipal dynamic, narcissistic mirroring, informs the Oedipal conflict.²⁹

      The second aspect of this masculine strategy concerns Florizel's actual response to the threat of separation. He clings to the ontological security of his ideal bond (see IV. iv. 464-465), and implies that separation is equivalent to a violent loss of potency:

                                            It cannot fail, but by

The violation of my faith; and then

Let nature crush the sides 0' th' earth together,

And mar the seeds within!      (IV. iv. 477-480)

Like Lear and Leontes, he imagines the alternative to Perdita's nurturance as a violent attack from the maternal source itself, the very" nature" with which Perdita is so richly identified. Like Leontes, he globalizes that fantasy, but now the poles of the fantasy have been reversed, and his" faith" in Perdita becomes, like a counter-phobic defense, the alternative to " perdition" (IV. iv. 379).

      Like Leontes' also, but reversed, is his defense in action against the threat of separation; he reaches for another artifice, another transformation of human actuality into superhuman (childhood) terms. Leontes sought Camillo in a plot to poison Polixenes, and when Camillo offers to provide the plot in which Florizel can be delivered to safety, he responds with the dynamic opposite of his fear of " natural" violence:

May this, almost a miracle, be done?

That I may call the something more than man

And after that trust to thee. (IV.iv.535-537, italics added)

In the economy of the play, when defenses are restored, idealization precedes trust. Supernatural identities convert passive helplessness (" . . .the slaves of chance, and flies/Of every wind that blows" [IV. iv. 541-542]) into active control. Florizel's reversal of Leontes' pathological dependency depends on finding an artifice to which he can submit, a masculine "plot" that transforms the threat of impotence into a form of omnipotence.³⁰

     In the lovers' flight from Bohemia, Camillo plays surrogate playwright, but only because Shakespeare has made another kind of revision of the play's earlier conflict into the occasion for its reversal. Polixenes interrupts the communion of Perdita and Florizel (symbolically a repetition of the mother-son communion Leontes had violated) after prompting his son to include the father in his celebration. The moment of interruption is significant, for its revives the inception of Leontes' jealousy. Observe the sequence:

              And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to't.

               I give my daughter to him and will make

              Her portion equal his.

Flo.       O, that must be

              l' th' virtue of your daughter: one being dead,

              I shall have more than you can dream of yet;

              Enough then for your wonder. But come on,

              Contract us 'fore these witnesses.

              And, daughter, yours.

Pol.                               Soft, swain, awhile, beseech you;

             Have you a father? (IV. iv. 384-393, italics added)

Polixenes and Camillo are about to witness the clasPing of hands, but the symbolic gesture does not occur. As I have shown in discussing Leontes' jealousy, the clasping of hands is an over-determined sight for Shakespeare. It can activate (I) an image of communion transcending separation (I. i. 29-30); (2) an image of boundary confusion in which self and other are co mingled" sexually (I. ii. 108-109);³¹ (3) the idea of an exclusive bond, in relation to which any other or witness is imagined as a potential rival for maternal nurturance.

      Polixenes interrupts this feared and wished-for touching of hands to assert his paternal prerogative in this communal ritual:

Methinks a father

Is at the nuptial of his son a guest

That best becomes the table. (IV. iv. 395-397)

His plea is for symbolic inclusion, a sign of symbolic continuity, without which he is nothing:

                       … reason my son

Should choose himself a wife, but as good reason

The father (all whose joy is nothing else

But fair posterity) should hold some counsel

In such a business. (IV. iv. 407-411, italics added)

Florizel "yield[s] all this" (411), yet co for some other reasons" (412) their difference remains absolutely un-negotiable. Is there not, beneath the social difference of Florizel and Perdita, an identity of father and son at play in this dispute? Their Oedipal rivalry ("one being dead") is based on what they have in common, a total investment in external signs of their continuity. Each sees all of his well-being in another, and each acts as if difference from all were nothing.³²

      As with Leontes, the fear of exclusion leads to a paranoid transformation of ideal relationships. Polixenes reveals himself suddenly and acts out a short version of Leontes' madness. He converts the purity of Florizel into baseness, the loyal Shepherd into an "old traitor" (421), Perdita into a "fresh piece/Of excellent witchcraft" (423-424). As he exits, he directs at Perdita the threat of death Leontes attempted to execute in relation to Hermione:

            If ever henceforth thou

These rural latches to his entrance open,

Or hoop his body more with thy embraces,

I will devise a death as cruel for thee

As thou are tender to't. (IV. iv. 438-442)

His imagery again recalls Leontes', the" gates" (I. ii. 197) opened against his will, the fear of feminine enclosure. Polixenes threatens to repeat the past, and for a moment we may feel that the cycle of over-and under-evaluations could revolve forever, like the seasons of the year. But we have seen a pattern in the first half of the play. When an idealized, narcissistic investment in another fails to include an internalization of the father's" counsel," the paternal words ultimately thought of as Apollo, then the consequence is a conversion of sacred relationships into their profane opposites, and Shakespeare's response to this conversion "downward" is to re-convert the possibility of libidinized violence into another form of paternal control. In Sicily, Leontes failed to see Apollonian idealizations, libidinized sacred relationships, and was finally confronted with the oracular version 01: true knowledge. Now Polixenes has been excluded, has turned ideal relationships into their opposites, and Shakespeare has Camillo reassert paternal control against the possibility of loss.

      Camillo's plot serves various purposes. It enables him to "re-view Sicilia, for whose sight/[He has] a woman's longing" (IV. iv. 666-667) and to re-unite himself with Leontes (". . .whom/I so much thirst to see" [IV. iv. 513-14]), in short, to fulfill his own oral desires. It enables Florizel to maintain his symbiosis with Perdita, .. from the whom.../ There's no disjunction to be made" (IV. iv. 529-530). It makes violation of the father's command into an indirect fulfillment of the father's wish for continuity, makes change into a form of constancy. It converts deception into a vehicle for the revelation of ideal identities, puts" art" in the service of "nature," as the final scene does.

      Camillo's plot transforms the identity of father and son into a means of re-union rather than a break in continuity. In his fantasy the son becomes a self-conscious representative of the father rather than an alternative to him:

       Methinks I see

Leontes opening his free arms and weeping

His welcome forth; asks thee there 'Son, forgiveness!'

As 'twere i' th' father's person. (IV. iv. 548-551)

      By impersonating his father, Florizel can replace him without really replacing him. In other words, masculine artifice has become a strategy for making difference coincide with identity. It is as if Shakespeare were saying that the art of men (his art), the making of plots, disguises and idealized roles, provides the only alternative to the loss of continuity he associates with uncontrolled feminine power. Active patterning of "nature" makes "nature" a source of ceremonial fulfillment; the fantasy of exclusion or unmediated submission makes " nature" persecutory. Florizel can preserve his idealized mother identification only within the context of its transformation in a masculine distribution of roles. Camillo, makes his wish for oral union coincide with the lovers' union by conceiving a play in which they all will bear a part. The "law and process of great nature" (II. ii. 60) is the fruit of this masculine defensive transformation of feared maternal powers. "I see the play so lies," says Perdita, "That I must bear a part." To which Camillo replies, "No remedy" (IV. ii. 655656).³³

In the economy of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare celebrates ideal femininity in the character of Perdita. His split conception of woman, so often represented in the form of opposing characters, is transformed in this play into a collated expression of opposites. This economy, it seems to me, corresponds to Shakespeare's fuller capacity to accept the (idealized) feminine part of himself, the" woman's part" he had denounced in Cymbeline and raged against in Lear. This is not to say that his conflict over feminine powers is resolved (it never was), but that we see a movement toward what Marion Milner calls" encompassing ambivalence, instead of using the defense of splitting and projection."³⁴

      Perdita displays the absolute internalization of parental decorum. She thinks of patriarchal authority is a sacred don nee of existence. For her, the pseudo-speciation³⁵ of social hierarchy, with its absolute differentiation of "noble" and "vile," projects an unquestionable structure of relationships. When Florizel, characteristically dismissing the claims of hierarchy to which he will finally be accommodated, blesses the time of their meeting, Perdita immediately expresses her concern for differences:

                          Now Jove afford you cause

To me the difference forges dread (your greatness

Hath not been us'd to fear): even now I tremble

To think your father, by some accident

Should pass this way, as you did: O the Fates!

How would he look, to see his work, so noble,

Vilely bound up? (IV. iv. 16-22, italics added)

The difference forges dread: this line, with metallic certainty, restores the taboo Leontes broke. The look of the gods that Paulina claimed Leontes had lost irretrievably in his psychic murder of Hermione returns in the consciousness of her child. " The sternness of his presence" (I.24) guarantees the stability of psychic and social boundaries. The son becomes "his work," the father's creation. Perdita's femininity depends for its realization on the acceptance of this archaic, biblical image of the father. Her charm derives from her flexibility within patriarchal control.

      Perdita recalls the" power of the king" (IV. iv. 37) to Florize1, and periodically she reminds us that her nature serves a paternal will:

                 Sir, welcome:

It is my father's will I should take on me

The hostess-ship 0' th' day. (IV. iv. 70-72)

     I see the play so lies

That I must bear a part. (IV. iv. 655-656)

Her language (" take on me," "must bear ") indicates how well she knows her place, how firmly rooted the paternal super-ego is in her mind. As Frye points out, Shakespeare gives Perdita four fathers in the course of the play, "a real one, a putative one who later becomes her father-in-law, a fictional one, Smalus of Lybia in Florizel's tale, and a shepherd foster-father."³⁶ In other words, although she is never without paternity, her changing fathers indicate the fluctuating status of the ideal that remains the same for her.

      Even Perdita's apparent contradiction of hierarchic differences voices her faith in paternal presence. When Polixenes (repeating Leontes) sexualizes her symbiotic bond with Florizel, she counters hi violation of differences (echoing Hermione) with an assertion of paternal benevolence:

I was about to speak, and tell him plainly,

The selfsame sun that shines upon his court

Hides not his visage from our cottage, but

Looks on alike.               (IV. iv. 444-447)

Like her mother, Perdita appeals to the transcendent presence of the Apollonian "visage," the pure father who protects differences by supervising (watching over) the decorum of social identities.³⁷ In identifying Polixenes' artifice as a violation of this paternal watchfulness (Apollo "hides not"), she reconstitutes the illusion that uniform protection coincides with hierarchic stability, the central illusion of the Shakespearean family romance. It is no accident that, immediately following her resilient expression of Apollonian faith, she renounces the dream of changing status:

                                                … this dream of mine

Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,

But milk my ewes, and weep. (IV. iv. 449-451)

Perdita's relation to paternal authority encompasses opposites without resolving the contradiction between hierarchic differences and identical, paternal benevolence. Her function is to embody the myth, not transcend it, for in the myth lies Shakespeare's strategy for coping with the terror of psychic and social boundary confusion. Just as Camillo's plot forms a way of making violation of the paternal will into a vehicle for its gratification, Perdita's character symbolizes the way in which Shakespeare puts the fear of maternal engulfment in the service of sacred continuities. Perdita encompasses sexual differences (virginal and erotic) , social differences (shepherdess and" queen "), mythic differences (Flora and Persephone), and, in imagistic terms, differences in the substances of life itself (earth and water). In family terms, Perdita brings together continuity and difference, being a daughter who also embodies the mother. In dramatic terms, she enacts the interplay of personal and super-personal roles that Leontes had transformed into the usurpation of public roles by private fantasy.

      To encompass irreconcilable opposites requires ritual. Erik Erikson's summary of ritual functions seems almost a description of the pastoral play Perdita presides over:

As the pastoral sequence opens, Perdita expresses both the customary nature of the ritual to be performed and its psychological basis:

                         …but that our feasts In

every mess have folly, and the feeders

Digest it with a custom, I should blush

To see you so attir'd; swoon, I think, To

show myself a glass. (IV. iv. 10-14)

In her acceptance of the occasion, she defines the very transformation Leontes had violated, the transformation of oral gratification into social form; "custom" formalizes what otherwise would create shame or display intolerable narcissistic ornament.³⁹ The occasion fuses its participants in common desires ("every mess") while it maintains the hierarchy of social roles, brings together sameness and difference, nature and culture. Perdita's part in the ritual is to maintain her distinctiveness while she simultaneously allows herself to be assimilated to a traditional role.

      The Shepherd defines her role as the polymorphous maternal one:

Fie, daughter! When my old wife liv'd, upon

This day was both pantler, butler, cook,

Both dame and servant; welcom'd all, serv'd all;

Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here

At upper end o' th' table, now i' the middle;

On his shoulder, and his; her face o' fire...

......................................…………………..

Come, quench your blushes, and present yourself

That which you are, Mistress o' th' Feast. (IV. iv. 55-68)

Perdita will discharge this consummate part in the place of an absent mother, yielding to her father's fantasy while maintaining her perspective on the occasion. 'When Camillo equates the sight of her mythologized self with oral fixation, she shows herself to be her mother's daughter by deflating his idealization:

Cam.   I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,

               And only live by gazing.

Per.                                                       Out, alas!

              You'd be so lean that blasts of January

           Would blow you through and through. (IV. iv. 109-112)

Like Hermione, she validates her ideal self in action without losing her sense of real consequences, and she becomes her role even as she retains a self-conscious awareness of its trans formative powers:

Methinks I playas I have seen them do

In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine

Does change my disposition. (IV. iv. 133-135)

With this awareness of ritual boundaries, Perdita restores to the play an integrated capacity for symbolic expression that recognizes itself; this is the sublimated counterpart of Autolycus' sexual displays, and the reversal of Leontes' regressive performance.

      When Leontes became absorbed in his paranoid fantasies, he sought to force the others in the court to conform to them. Perdita reverses this strategy also; she enacts the Elizabethan wish for ideal correspondences, giving each person the flowers that" fit" (IV. iv. 78) his or her biological condition. Her ritual assimilates the human time that leads to death to the cyclical time of allegorized nature, implying that rebirth inevitably follows loss, "summer's death" leading round to "the birth/ Of trembling winter" (IV. iv. 8081). The cyclical reality of oral childhood in transposed to the stage in cosmic terms. In language and. symbolic action Perdita expresses the communal artifice that obviates the fear of loss and separation by saying, in effect: "Loss (winter, separation, death, oral deprivation or violence) is real but merely part of the inexorable process of re-creation (reunion, life, oral communion). Continuity involves separation, life requires death." By idealizing this cyclical process, Perdita symbolically structures the polarities of the play's earlier action.²⁰ The myth of natural correspondences contains ambivalence toward loss by " revolving" it in seasonal recurrence.

      Perdita rejects the superficial narcissism of cosmetics (IV. iv. 99-103), yet she embodies the transformed narcissism that identifies nature and culture, making" great creating nature" (IV. iv. 88) a reflection of human growth. Her flowers symbolize sexuality without the bodily anxieties that saturated Leontes' mind. Within the context of ritual order, she can recall erotic anxieties, because they are distanced by the allegorical and mythological modes of the occasion.

The marigold, that goes to bed wi' th' sun

And with him rises, weeping… (IV. iv. 105-106)

                                          … pale primroses,

That die unmarried, ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady

Most incident to maids) . . . (IV. iv. 122-; 25)

This allegorical eroticism makes the pain and shame of sexual relationships seem impersonally beautiful. We can participate in her fantasies of erotic disappointment and attraction as if the fears evoked by the earlier action were simply instances of eternal possibilities.

      In relation to Florizel, Perdita expresses and negates the fear of maternal malevolence that possessed Leontes:

Per.                            O Proserpina,

            For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let'st fall

            From Dis's wagon!

...................................................................................

                                   O, these I lack,

            To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend,

            To strew him o'er and o'er!

Flo.                         What, like a corpse?

Per.     No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on:

            Not like a corpse; or if-not to be buried,

            But quick, and in mine arms. (IV. iv. 116-132)

On a manifest level, Perdita does not wish to be Proserpina, but to possess her lost flowers and to transform them into ornaments of her love. She emphasizes her "lack" of supplies, her wish for abundance.⁴⁰ But she also evokes the violence of rape, the deflowering of a young virgin whose names means "the bringer of destruction," and she provokes Florizel's association of her abundant giving with death.⁴¹ The virgin Proserpina becomes the goddess of death after she is deflowered. These associations crystallize the fear that feminine sexuality renders men impotent, that erotic ornament can smother its object.

      Perdita negates this fantasy first by identifying Florizel with the earth. He becomes the field of love (unconsciously, I think, the maternal body); then she implies that death and life are reversible: "Not like a corpse; or if not to be buried,/ But quick…" Like Proserpina, Perdita contains in this fantasy both the power to destroy him and to bring him to life. He becomes the space she plays on and the one she plays with. In psychoanalytic terms, she becomes the mother of very early childhood, who, not differentiated psychically from her child, still is imagined to create and destroy his existence. The Proserpina myth recreates this condition as a natural cycle, and Perdita provides an immense reassurance against its catastrophic potential.

      With the opposites of creation and destruction formalized by ritual, and with Perdita and Florizel brought into the structure of Camillo's plot, Shakespeare has brought the play around to the idealized condition violated by Leontes. Now it is time to return to Sicily.

      Act V brings us back to the court. This time the transition from one symbolic space to another involves no violence, and instead of the boundary anxieties we witnessed on the coast of Bohemia, we are introduced to a setting governed by words.⁴² Leontes, consigned to absence for sixteen years, is presented to us as a figure of exemplary repentance. He has been transformed in his absence, and we see only the result of a process for which the Bohemian interval has substituted. Leontes is not, however, an isolated exemplum of virtues restored. He sits between Paulina on the one hand and Cleomenes and Dion on the other, like a figure in a psychomachia hearing the externalized voices of himself urging different futures. The scene, until the announcement of Perdita and Florizel, presents us with an iconographic representation of Leontes' still conflicted condition.

      In the language of religious economics Cleomenes urges Leontes to "forgive [him] self " (V. i. 6); he has "paid down/ More penitence than done trespass" (II. 3-4). The masculine superego that enforces forgiveness expresses itself in an anal mode; Leontes has" done enough, "performed, "redeem'd" and "paid down" his internalized debt. As we would expect, this debt-consciousness is a response to the fear of oral catastrophe:

Dion.                      . . .consider little,

            What dangers, by his highness' fail of issue,

            May drop upon his kingdom, and devour

            Incertain lookers on. (V. i. 26-29)

In these lines Shakespeare condenses a central dynamic of the play. Paternal continuity (the potency of the king) , "royalty's repair" (V. i. 31), transforms the fantasy of engulfment into "present comfort" and" future good" (1. 32). To insure the integrity of the body politic requires the propagation of "his most sovereign name" (1. 26), a supra-personal defense against the fear of communal disintegration. Dion urges Leontes to substitute another queen for Hermione, not in renunciation of her imagined virtues, but to prevent the fantasy Leontes conceived in his jealousy from being realized. "To bless the bed of majesty again/With a sweet fellow to't" (II. 33-34) is to restore symbolic parentage sanctioned by the gods as a protection against externalized oral aggression.

      Paulina voices a different mystique, one which captures Leontes' compliance. As the embodiment of the maternal super-ego and the voice of Apollo, she dismisses the possibility of active reparation:

If, one by one, you wedded all the world,

Or from the all that are, took something good,

To make a perfect woman, she you kill'd

Would be unparrallel'd.          (V. iv. 13-16)

Hermione cannot be replaced, no substitute created in reality to undo her psychic murder. Paulina's totalistic sensibility proclaims perpetual frustration, unless Leontes surrender completely to the" sweet purposes" (1.36) of the gods and the words of the Oracle. For her, Hermione's death is the consequence of Leontes' murderous wish; she appeals to him on the level of psychic omnipotence, and he accepts her control:

She I kill’d! I did so: but thou strik’st me

Sorely, to say I did: it is as bitter

Upon thy tongue as in my thought. (VI. 16-18, italics added)

Paulina has become the externalized voice of his inner orientation; the correspondence is restorted between her oral aggression and his masochistic penance. Leontes has been brought into accord with her infantilizing power. He accepts her "monstrous" (1.41) logic with the memory of the very gratification she withholds:⁴³

                                            O, that I ever

            Has squar’d me to thy counsel! Then, even now,

I might have look’d upon my queen’s full eyes,

Have taken treasure from her lips. (V.i.51-54)

In the logic of the fantasy being enacted, to accept bitterness is to earn the primal gratifications of infancy; Leontes' imagery shows how constant his yearning for that primal relation to the mother remains.

      In his acquiescence to Paulina, Leontes rejects the advice of his masculine ministers. He reveals, instead, the terribly powerful fantasy of Hermione's psychic reality:

Leon.   No more such wives; therefore, no wife: one worse,

            And better us'd, would make her sainted spirit

            Again possess her corpse, and on this stage

            (Were we offenders now) appear soul-vex'd,

            And begin, 'Why to me?'

Paul.                                             Had she such power,

            She had just cause.

Leon.                           She had; and would incense me

            To murder her I married. (V. i. 56-62, italics added)

The "sainted spirit" of the mother would incite him to murder. To marry would risk repeating the past by becoming the instrument of an internal demonic saint. The inner structure of Leontes' psyche has not changed; his re-conversion to the sacred view of the mother contains all the ambivalence it did before. What has changed is his relation to the mystique Paulina embodies. Now their polar opposition has become a consonance of voices.⁴⁴ Leontes now accepts the symbiotic dependence he had attempted to refuse: